URDU LANGUAGE

Indo-Aryan language originating in the region between the Ganges and Jamuna rivers near Delhi, now the official language of Pakistan. Numbering some 48,980,000 speakers in the late 20th century, Urdu is the primary language of the Muslims of both Pakistan and northern India. As a spoken language, Urdu originally derived from Hindustani, the lingua franca of northern India before the partition of 1947. Although Urdu and Hindi arose from the same or very similar colloquial bases, their literary forms are almost mutually unintelligible because of the strong influences of Sanskrit on Hindi and of Persian and Arabic on Urdu. Grammar in the two languages is still nearly the same, however, except in instances in which literary Urdu adopts Persian or Arabic constructions. Nouns and pronouns show only two cases, nominative and oblique; the place of inflectional endings is taken by postpositions (similar to English prepositions, but following the object) attached to the oblique case. Urdu is written in a modified form of the Persian Arabic alphabet.